CGAS and cancer: In addition, CIN triggers an inflammatory response through activation of the cGAS-STING pathway, an specialized antiviral mechanism that detects double-stranded DNA spilled into the cytosol from ruptured micronuclei containing defective chromosomal content (Mackenzie et al. 2017; Motwani et al. 2019) leading to the subsequent downstream activation of the type I interferon pathway (Galluzzi et al. 2018; Sun et al. 2013) to initiate innate and adaptive immune responses that clear the damaged cell, a process that can be hijacked by cancer cells as further discussed below (Bakhoum et al. 2018).